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Waves surge in opposite directions around Io’s largest lava lake

SURF’S up on Jupiter’s moon. Magma waves travelling both clockwise and anticlockwise have been spotted for the first time on the surface of a lava lake on Io, the solar system’s most volcanically active body.

We’ve known since the 1970s that the lake, called Loki Patera, periodically brightens and dims. Previous observations suggested that these changes are caused by the lake recycling itself. As the top layer of lava cools, it solidifies and grows dense, until eventually it sinks beneath the underlying magma and pulls nearby crust with it in waves moving across the surface.

Now Katherine de Kleer at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues have created a time-lapse sequence of changing temperatures across the lava lake’s surface. Surprisingly, the temperature map revealed two sets of waves moving in different directions, one clockwise and the other anticlockwise. The waves started at different times and ran around a cool island in the lake’s centre (Nature, doi.org/b62t).

De Kleer thinks understanding how magma is exposed on Loki Patera’s surface can offer insight into volcanism on planets and moons that are different from Earth.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Lava waves criss-cross on Jupiter moon”